U2 elevate New York

Bono and his band stage an ecstatic Irish wake for a city that was never more in need of one.

By David Talbot

Oct. 29, 2001 | The Irish are experts at grieving -- and no band is more blessed at putting grief into song than U2. Last week Ireland's greatest contribution to music (along with Van Morrison) brought its "Elevation" tour to New York's Madison Square Garden; with its towers turned to dust and its people brought low, no city was in more need of elevation.

It was my first visit to New York since Sept. 11 and the sorrow that hangs over this supremely self-confident city made it seem strangely unfamiliar. I bumped into an old acquaintance on the street one evening; he was hurrying to a counseling session for his two young children. They go to a school, he told me, that was near the World Trade Center and they saw too much that morning. He is a big man, from an established New York family, and I had remembered the way he seemed to plow through life. But now he seemed bent-shouldered in mourning.

He urged me to visit a SoHo gallery on Prince Street that had been turned into a photo archive of the city's calamity -- hundreds of professional and amateur pictures of war-torn lower Manhattan, the sale of which is benefiting the orphans of Sept. 11. When I went the next day, a line of somber people stretched down the street and around the corner. Inside the gallery, the crowd shuffled quietly and respectfully from one haunting image to the next, a crushed fire helmet, a man collapsed in tears on the shoulder of a policeman. The photo exhibit, titled "Here Is New York," has become one more wake where the city bids farewell not only to its dead but to its sense of invulnerability.

But it's the wound known as "ground zero" that attracts the most people. They come by the thousands each day, the suffering and the morbidly curious, like the crowds drawn to the statues of bleeding saints. The morning I visited, a blaring headline in the New York Daily News warned that the monumental pile of rubble is a toxic dump. As soon as I got out of my cab at a National Guard roadblock near the site, the stench announced itself, as alarmingly wrong as the smell of an electrical fire. I walked past Trinity Church, ghostly in its coating of dust, its wall covered with flowers and posters with condolences from mourners who have trekked from London and Bali and Tel Aviv. We filed past a police barricade, one block from the wreckage. On the corner, a street vendor wearing a gas mask sold red, white and blue scarves. There were hundreds of people on the streets, but it was as quiet as a funeral procession.

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The noise level at Madison Square Garden on Thursday night, the second of U2's three sold-out New York shows, was a lot higher, but there was a similar seriousness of purpose. One of the most frequent criticisms of U2 over the years -- aimed mainly at lead singer and lyricist Bono -- is they take themselves too seriously. They clearly see their mission as spiritual as well as musical, although this is leavened by occasional self-mockery. ("Have you come here to play Jesus/To the lepers in your head?") But the audience on Thursday night was on the exact same wavelength -- they had come to party hard and to cry, and U2 delivered the Irish wake they were looking for.

No rock band's body of work seemed more appropriate for the occasion. U2's songs have often ached with suffering and loss, from "One Tree Hill" to "Peace on Earth" ("They're reading names out over the radio/All the folks the rest of us won't get to know/ ... Their lives are bigger than any big idea.") And some of their music is a direct rebuttal to the cycle of terror and revenge that has wracked their own land ever since they were boys. When, in the middle of "Sunday Bloody Sunday," Bono screamed, "I'm so sick of it," his anguish seemed to resonate throughout the arena, although New York's suffering has decades to go before it matches Belfast's.

Next page: "How long must we sing this song?"